In terms of tax reporting, the source of your payments isn't hugely important, since no Group Certificates or anything like that are issued from foreign firms. All that is important is how much you earned, what expenses were involved in the running of your business, and whether there was a GST component associated (most often there won't be).

If you don't have your bank statements on hand, you should be able to retrieve this info, or order past statements through your online banking service.

15% of you make 6 digits? We are not counting to the hundreths place guys 6 digits is to the LEFT of the decimal

If you honestly make over $100k/year yikes, whats your site!

Not everyone who is an online professional makes their money through content sites. I don't see why those figures are hard to believe when you look at the quality of the sites, products and services that are sold by the members of this forum.

In the last 24 hours 141 unique members have visited geek/talk. This is tracked via the member session cookie which is very persistent. Only members in good standing can vote.

Any final conslusions may be premature given that just 75 folks have voted as of this post. Thats a bit higher than what I expsected but this is really unchartered water. Thanks for all of you who chose to participate.

The majority of members can afford to pay $9.95 per month to use geek/talk </joke>

Seriously, I hope and pray everyone takes these Polls seriously and gives honest answers and only votes once. Natch, all Polls have a "fudge factor" or what some call an error factor.

The geek/talk member demographic is significantly different than the average run of the mill BB. Each Community has their own way of doing this so I'm respectfull of other methods and the fine Boards that do this. We do have Merchants who I presume voted as well as Corporate types. Thats one of our unique strengths Lets wait and see. This is our first real Poll in this Forum so it might take us some time to fine tune the procedure.

AND, speaking of Polls please take a minute and vote in our Speed Poll at:

i just went thru my little box-o-receipts and tallied that i made $14921.43 in profits in the last 365 days. Im very proud of myself even tho many of ya'll make 10X that... The only sad part is that i dont really think ill ever make that much again in a year from the web........... WELL MAYBE! Im soon to launch a new really tight program called skinbot... Ill be sure to show you all this program before i launch it. Its a new exciting thing that allows you to have skins on your browser (without the gross ad bar that hotbar makes you have).

Again, as I posted months ago.... I feeeeeeeel SOOO lucky that i, joe shmo, was able to find out about the net while you could still make money relativily easily. I feel sorta sad for the other million's of american teens who werent as fortunate.

thanx..... but i lost about 2 friends for that $15000.... I turned down alot of oppurtunities to go do fun things cuz I wanted to work on building sites... BUT ITS ALL GOOD NOW... Im back and very happy... so i would do it again.

quote:
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Originally posted by Jan
Just as a matter of interest to 'overseas' affiliates, if you are earning big money, do you have to declare it?

At present the Australian Tax Office doesn't know about my earnings from the net. I don't even know if we have to tell them.

not only do you have to pay tax on your earnings you also have to pay GST on your affiliate commissions if it's an Australian who purchases the product you receive commission on.

A few months ago the Aussie tax office got their lawyers in Canberra to make a private ruling on my overseas affiliate earnings.

And what they came up with was:

Their letter is full of official gobbledegook, but it seems to say that we have to pay GST on our affiliate commissions whenever an aussie resident buys a product.

"It is considered that you are making a supply of your services as a promotional agent to the various vendors who pay you an "affiliate" commission. The commission you receive is consideration for this supply."

............

"when there is no relation ( to Australia ) to the acquisition of your promotional services, you may offer that supply GST free."

.................

"When you receive an affiliate commission from an Australian entity the commission will be subject to GST. In practice for you it will most likely be impractical to request that you be paid an additional 10% to cover this GST liability.

"The cost of GST payable on such commissions is 1/11 of the consideration received."
____________________________

In practical terms we often don't know whether the person buying the product is an aussie or not but it seems we have to try and find out.

Well I haven't handled anything with the ATO yet. But I'm worried about it.

I've been making my money by writing about affiliate programs in my weekly newsletter, plus running a number of mini sites. Most readers are from the US, and I'd guess around 3-6% are Aussies. Sometimes I can tell if an Aussie buys from me - when the affiliate program is run through Clickbank, for instance, it shows the country of the buyer, but usually I can't tell.

But things are going to get more complicated. I've just released my first book, about building mini sites, and I'm about to launch my own affiliate program.